{"id":124,"date":"2010-07-26T17:11:55","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T00:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andrewjwahlquist.com\/manwhowasthursday\/?p=124"},"modified":"2010-08-20T11:26:56","modified_gmt":"2010-08-20T18:26:56","slug":"the-great-unconscious-gravity-of-a-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/?p=124","title":{"rendered":"The Great Unconscious Gravity of a Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"

There I saw Rosamond, Gregory\u2019s sister with the goldred hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, laughing with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rosamond is mentioned twice in The Man Who Was Thursday<\/em> book.\u00a0 Once, right after Gabriel’s first debate with Lucien Gregory “the real anarchist” as he’s known.\u00a0 She catches his eye, and later asks him his advice on her brother’s anarchism.\u00a0 He says,<\/p>\n

“Now, sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing that he does mean. And it doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s only a half-truth, a quarter-truth, or tenth-truth; he will say it much more than he means– simply from the sheer force of meaning it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The second appearance is at the very end of the book, after everything has faded away into something else that we’re not quite sure what.\u00a0 Gabriel’s vision of her is the final line of the book.\u00a0 But Chesterton himself almost alludes to the idea that he wishes she could have appeared in more places in the story.<\/p>\n

In the wild events which were to follow this girl had no official role to play. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all the mad adventures afterward, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hence the idea that I would literally follow that vein– have Rosamond keep recurring like a motive in music.\u00a0 So I added two more scenes in which she appears and speaks to Gabriel.\u00a0 In the narrative, Gabriel rarely gets a moment to breathe and collect his thoughts.\u00a0 As he’s lost in this world where anything can take off its mask and become something else, Rosamond is the one constant.\u00a0 She has no agenda, she has no artifice, nor is she put off by Gabriel’s penchant for wit and melodrama.\u00a0 She has a genuine interest in who Gabriel is and cares about what he is going through.\u00a0 She also serves as a beacon, reminding him of what might be in store for him on the other side of this nightmare, should he ever wake up.<\/p>\n

Adding words to Chesterton is one of the most harrowing and risky things I can do.\u00a0 It’s much safer to cut things and streamline the story and dialog without changing the nature of it.\u00a0\u00a0 Adaptation is a special kind of art, and can be approached in many different ways, but the one thing I consistently believe is that the artist needs to find a way to personalize it to their own point of view.\u00a0 There are certain things in Thursday<\/em> that speak to me, and ideas that I latched on to while reading it.\u00a0 These are the things I try to bring out in my radio adaptation.<\/p>\n